On Point

Carroll: Slippery holiday slope

denver-admin — 2007-11-13T00:26:49-07:00

We used to debate whether religious symbols were appropriate — or even legal — on public property at Christmas time. Now we apparently must debate whether anything that makes someone think of Christmas should be displayed.

Carroll: Parental gall

denver-admin — 2007-11-09T00:19:57-07:00

Remember the old Borscht Belt definition of chutzpah: a kid who kills his parents and then pleads for mercy from the court because he’s an orphan?

Maybe that’s where Christina Grafner and Josh Norris got the inspiration for their plan to sue state and county child welfare agencies for $150,000 each, claiming the government failed to protect their son.

The government failed to protect their son? What about them?

Carroll: Clearing the air

denver-admin — 2007-11-07T00:42:57-07:00

Gov. Bill Ritter’s Climate Action Plan is a “living document,” we are told early in the text, meaning “it does not include the full array of measures we will need to undertake to comprehensively address climate change in Colorado.”

I’ll say. The plan barely includes the warm-up drills for the grueling acrobatics that would be needed to reach the governor’s goals of a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 (with 2005 as the base).

Carroll: Blather about business

denver-admin — 2007-11-06T00:09:26-07:00

"Denver Post owner Dean Singleton’s front-page editorial attacking Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter on Sunday appears unprecedented in its name-calling, at least in the newspaper’s recent history,” insists former Post columnist Jim Spencer on the liberal Web site ColoradoConfidential.com.

Another prominent progressive site, ColoradoPols.com, was equally agog, declaring that “Running a front-page editorial in a major metropolitan newspaper is indefensibly wrong.”

Really? So this is engraved on tablets somewhere?

Carroll: The 'Truthers' cult

denver-admin — 2007-11-01T08:00:19-07:00

Just when you thought Bill Maher was a total dead weight on the culture, up pops the comic with a gift of genuine value. In the space of a few weeks, Maher has turned himself into a target of the 9/11 conspiracy cult — first by dropping a few jokes at the cult’s expense and then by ejecting a handful of its zealots from his Real Time show while calling one a “nut case” on his way out.

Carroll: Numbers game

denver-admin — 2007-10-31T00:01:19-07:00

You can’t blame some parents for getting their backs up at the Denver Public Schools for replacing letter grades in middle schools with a system of 1-2-3-4. Even when you understand the theory behind the change, it’s not clear what it means in practice.

Carroll: Brownouts by design

denver-admin — 2007-10-26T00:50:54-07:00

The new energy economy is coming faster than you think — although perhaps not in the alluring form foreseen by green governors such as Bill Ritter and Arnold Schwarzenegger, with plentiful energy flowing from endless rows of windmills and solar panels strung across the fruited plain.

No, the new energy economy increasingly looks as if it may be a world of shortages and even brownouts, as well as electricity prices trending sharply higher.

If so, it will be the result of decisions we can see being made today.

Carroll: Poor judgment

denver-admin — 2007-10-23T00:20:53-07:00

Poor U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham, born a century or so too late, fated to live without the deference and privilege due to someone of his exalted station.

Carroll: Playing to his base

denver-admin — 2007-10-20T00:36:47-07:00

Et tu, Jared?

Earlier this year, I made the case that Jared Polis is the most interesting Democratic candidate for the 2nd Congressional District — a district destined, I noted, to “elect another liberal in 2008 to replace Mark Udall.”

Why the most interesting? Because Polis is a remarkable entrepreneur who “marches to his own drummer at times — on educational choice, to cite one example.”

In recent weeks, unfortunately, Polis has muffled that drum as he falls back to the safe but stupefying strategy of pandering to his party’s political base.

Carroll: Devoted to density

denver-admin — 2007-10-18T00:50:56-07:00

After my column last week on Denver’s aggressive push for high-density development near the Southmoor rail station, I received several plaintive e-mails similar to the following:

“I live in Lowry,” wrote Gail Bell, “and the Lowry residents along with all of the surrounding East Denver neighborhoods have been fighting against numerous high-density developments for over a year. Why haven’t we been able to get any support from the media or the mayor?”

The second part of her question is easy to answer: They can’t get the support of the mayor because he’s not particularly sympathetic to Denverites who resist higher density

Carroll: Bullied by the majority

denver-admin — 2007-10-16T00:56:55-07:00

If Bill and Paula Leake were counting on a white knight to rescue them from the aggressive designs of the Metro Baseball Stadium District, they may have to look somewhere other than the mayor’s office.

Carroll: Don't have a cow, man

denver-admin — 2007-10-16T00:16:06-07:00

Is red meat the next tobacco? Is the federal government destined to hector Americans about their consumption of beef in the same way it now discourages smoking — and perhaps even levy a special tax on it someday?

Until recently, such questions were not merely improbable, they were silly. But no longer. When an ultra-establishment voice such as the Los Angeles Times devotes a 1,600-word editorial to the perils of “Killer cow emissions,” not as parody but as serious analysis, you know that concern over porterhouse steaks has elbowed its way into the mainstream.

Carroll: High density realities

denver-admin — 2007-10-12T00:39:01-07:00

Mayor John Hickenlooper spun reality on its head at a meeting Wednesday when confronted by southeast Denver residents irate about the possibility of several blocks of high-density, multistory housing near the Southmoor light-rail station.

Carroll: Standing up for trade

denver-admin — 2007-10-11T00:01:27-07:00

“I absolutely agree that trade is a great idea in many respects,” Tom Tancredo said in Tuesday’s GOP presidential debate, while giving a very good impression of a man who thinks trade is a bad idea in many respects.

Carroll: No fault, this time

denver-admin — 2007-10-10T00:23:56-07:00

Carol Chambers has been faulted for a number of things during her term as district attorney for Arapahoe, Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties, but not — until now — for playing to the grandstand in pursuit of easy praise and eventual votes.

Quite the opposite. Most of Chambers’ controversial moves — complaining about her salary, announcing she would not prosecute cases involving a certain Aurora cop, monitoring judges’ hours and highlighting the possibility of “overt hostility” by jurists toward her prosecutors, to mention a few of the incidents — have almost been guaranteed to generate a backlash of bad publicity.